OpenTop Secure Sockets
OpenTop supports applications which need to perform secure
transactions over insecure networks such as the internet.
To achieve this, OpenTop fully supports the SSL/TLS protocol
and provides a family of
Secure Socket Layer (SSL/TLS) classes which are easily integrated
into any application.
Secure Socket Classes
OpenTop's networking facilities are built around its
extremely robust and portable family of
Socket
classes. These classes implement a C++ wrapper around the socket API
of the underlying platform and provide robust error handling
as well as smoothing any inconsistencies between platforms.
The OpenTop
SSL socket classes
derive from (and are interchangeable with)
the same interfaces as
plain sockets, but are extended to provide the following additional security
features:-
- server and client authentication (via CA certificates)
- session encryption (privacy protection)
- tamper protection (man-in-the-middle attack protection)
Converting an application from using plain sockets to secure sockets
is trivial and simply involves adding a few extra lines of initialization
code.
.
3rd-Party Security Providers
OpenTop employs a security provider model, which
consists of the necessary infrastructure and API hooks to allow
any third-party encryption library to be used as the underlying encryption
engine for OpenTop secure sockets.
OpenTop provides explicit support for the popular
OpenSSL package,
which can be configured as the default security provider.
